On June 22, 2012 on the website called Crikey was an article about digital divide effecting elderly people and how they trying to bridge the gap on this serious issue. An online article written by Mark Egan called Connecting The Elderly, is a case where digital divide is effecting the elderly people. It was a study conducted by researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Society trying to fix an issue about the elderly people not being socially connected.

Next, so to bridge the gap between the elderly people and social media the team built an iPad application which allows participants to create and share their photos and messages with each other, and provided seven elderly people and two of their care takers. Within ten weeks into the study the participants were able to build social connections in order to help bring their social experience to life.

Moving forward, one of the elderly people said, “The study has been very successful with me. I had a very bad time of depression; It has made a lot of difference. Not the actual act of taking pictures, but the act of being able to communicate with others who are doing the same thing.” The participant life was changed after being connected to social media, he felt happy about sharing content with other people and giving feedback and receiving feedback from others.

Finally, they concluded their research and came up with a conclusion. Saying that, “It is important to recognize that while technologies offer particular opportunities to extend older people’s social networks, social isolation cannot be alleviated by technology alone.” Which means that technology is improving each day but it is mostly aimed at the younger generation and not the older people. So to help fix that they tested a few elderly people first to see if they would like the application and see if it made them feel socially connected and it did. Now more companies are making applications aimed at elderly people, so they can still feel connected to the world not just in person, but also on social media or the internet is what they would say.

Personally, I liked the idea about companies making applications that are not just aimed at the youth generation, I think it will bring the world together on social media.

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